Book Review:

Search for the Manchurian Candidate

by John Marks

Based on 16,000 pages of FOIA documents supplied by the CIA

(This document as of June 23, 2001)

This book is one of the very best describing the MKULTRA government
intelligence mind control programs. The visitor unaware of MKULTRA needs
to keep in mind that 8 adult victims, out of several hundred adult and
child victims, did successfully sue
the CIA and WON. MKULTRA is not a hoax, and several hundred adult AND
CHILD victims still await compensation and an official apology from the
U.S. and Canadian governments.

to provide the experimentee with historical knowledge which can defeat
the excuse, used by police and psychiatrists, that anyone who thinks government
harasses citizens needs psychiatric treatment

to provide the experimentee with historical precedent for public education
efforts

This book shows clearly that morally bankrupt people in positions of
authority are not particularly rare, and the moral bankruptcy extends even
to torturing fellow citizens.

Top
Bibliographic Info
Start of Tables Section
Table 1: Program Code Names
Table 2: People
Table 3: Glossary
Table 4: Quotes Showing Experimenters' Attitudes
Table 5: Intelligence-Media Connections
Table 6: Origins of Street Theater and "Pranks"
List of Participating Institutions
Office of Research and Development, CIA, which is the
Agency division most likely connected with the current exotic "mind
weapons" and associated tactics
THE SEARCH FOR THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
THE CIA AND MIND CONTROL
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Copyright 1979, John Marks
Paperback, 264 pages, $10.00 US, W.W. Norton & Company Inc.
Hard to find but available if you try (or try a library)
ISBN 0-393-30794-8
IMPORTANT: There is another book titled "The Manchurian Candidate"
by author Richard Condon. That book was FICTION, but the book by
John Marks, who was a staff member for State Department Intelligence,
who worked hand in hand with the CIA, is non-fiction.
INTRODUCTION: (page vii) " 'Our guiding light is not the Hippocratic
Oath', a doctor working for the Central Intelligence Agency told a
classroom full of recruits back in the mid-1960s, 'but the victory
of freedom' "
AUTHOR'S NOTE: (page ix) "This book has grown out of 16,000 pages
of documents that the CIA released to me under the Freedom of
Information Act. Without these documents, the best investigative
reporting in the world could not have produced a book, and the secrets
of CIA mind control would have remained buried forever, as the men who
knew them had obviously intended. From the documentary base, I was
able to expand my knowledge through interviews and readings in the
behavioral sciences. Nevertheless, the final result is not the whole
story of the CIA's attack on the mind. Only a few insiders could have
written that, and they choose to remain silent. I have done the best
I can to make the book as accurate as possible, but I have been
hampered by the refusal of most of the principal characters to be
interviewed and by the CIA's destruction in 1973 of many of the key
documents."

TABLE 1: PROGRAM CODE NAMES

BLUEBIRDpage 24

Started 1950, "Security Chief Sheffield Edwards, a former Army colonel
who a decade later would personally handle joint CIA-Mafia operations...",
"...would use the teams to check out agents and defectors for the whole
CIA.", "Each team would consist of a psychiatrist, a polygraph (lie detector)
expert trained in hypnosis, and a technician."

ARTICHOKEpage 31

"Between 1950 and 1952, responsibility for mind control went from the
Office of Security to the Scientific Intelligence unit back to Security
again. In the process, BLUEBIRD was rechristened ARTICHOKE." See BLUEBIRD
above for the purpose of the ARTICHOKE program.

MKULTRApage 60 - 61

"On April 3, 1953, Helms proposed to Director Allen Dulles that the
CIA set up a program under Gottlieb for 'covert use biological and chemical
materials.' Helms made it clear htat the Agency could use these methods
in 'present and future clandestine operations' " Eleanor White's note:
Although MKULTRA started as 'biological and chemical' and officially ran
for only 11 years, other research spun off from this core program. See
ORD and it's work in Table 3: Glossary.

"He [Allen Dulles] approved an initial budget of $300,000 exempted
from normal CIA financial controls, and allowed TSS to start up research
projects 'without the signing of contracts or other written agreements.'
Dulles ordered the Agency's bookkeepers to pay the costs blindly...' "

"Sid Gottlieb later testified that the purpose of these programs was
'to investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual's
behavior by covert means.' "

MKDELTApage 61

"Under the code name MKDELTA, the Clandestine Services had set up procedures
the year before [1953] to govern the use of CBW [chemical and biological
warfare] products."

MKNAOMIpage 61

"Also in 1952, TSS had made an agreement with the Special Operations
Division (SOD) of the Army's biological research center at Fort Detrick,
Maryland whereby SOD would produce germ warfare weapons for the CIA's use..."

CASTIGATEpage 40 - 41

[Summer of 1952] "...the CIA men agreed to furnish the human beings
- in Germany - even though they had no idea what [Dr. G. Richard] Wendt
had in store for his guinea pigs. The CIA named the operation CASTIGATE."
[Eleanor White: This project was another involuntary drug testing project,
like ARTICHOKE.]

CHATTERpage 38, 40

[p 38] "...a highly classified Navy program called project CHATTER.",
"...CHATTER's goals of weakening, if not eliminating free will in others.
The Navy program, which started in 1947, was aimed at developing a truth
drug..."

[p 40] "The drugs were to be tested on involuntary subjects. [Dr. Samuel]
Thompson readily admits that this procedure was 'unethical', but he says,
'We felt we had to do it for the good of the country.' "

MKSEARCHpage 211

"In June 1964, MKULTRA became MKSEARCH."

THIRD CHANCEpage 67

"Army researchers, as usual running about five year behind the CIA,
became interested in the sustained use of LSD as interrogation device during
1961 field tests (called Operation THIRD CHANCE). The Army men tested the
drug in Europe on nine foreigners and one American, a black soldier named
James Thornwell, accused of stealing classified documents. While Thornwell
was reacting to the drug under extremely stressful conditions, his captors
threatened 'to extend the state indefinitely, even to a condition of permanent
insanity."

TABLE 2: PEOPLE

JOHN MARKSpage xi

"Before joining the Foreign Service in 1965, Marks had graduated from
Cornell, embarking on a personal odyssey in many ways typical of the last
generation of American college students for whom Vietnam had once been
only a geographical place name. Classified 1A by his local draft board
two years later, Marks volunteered for State Department duty in Vietnam,
where he spent 18 months working in the pacification program.", "By the
middle of the year [1968] Marks was back in Washington where he was assigned
as a staff assistant to the Director of Intelligence and Research, Ray
Cline. Every Thursday he accompanied Cline to meetings of the United States
Intelligence Board on the 7th floor of the CIA's headquarters in Langley,
Virginia just outside Washington."

GEORGE ESTABROOKSpage 20 - 21

"...there were a handful of serious experimenters in the field [mind
control] who believed in [hypnotism's] military potential. The most vocal
partisan of this view was the head of the Psychology Department at Colgate
University, George "Esty" Estabrooks. Since the 1930s, Estabrooks had periodically
ventured out of his sleepy upstate campus to advise the military on applications
of hypnotism.", "[Estabrooks] felt that government sanction of the process
would relieve the hypnotist of personal responsibility. 'Any accidents
that might occur during the experiments will simply be charged to profit
and loss', he wrote, 'a very trifling portion of the enormous wastage in
human life which is part and parcel of war.' "

JOHN ANGLETONpage 202

"In June 1960 TSS officials launched an expanded program of operational
experiments in hypnosis in cooperation with the Agency's Counterintelligence
Staff.", "...James Angleton ... took on some of the Agency's most sensitive
missions (including the illegal Agency spying against domestic dissidents)."

JOHN GITTINGERpage 19

"... a young Oklahoma psychologist John Gittinger, who would rise in
the CIA on the strength of his ideas about how to make a hard science out
of personality assessment and how to use it to manipulate people."

TABLE 3: GLOSSARY

MANCHURIANCANDIDATEpage 9

Footnote: "The term "Manchurian Candidate" came into the language in
1959 when [fiction] author Richard Condon made it the title of his best-selling
novel that later became a popular movie starring Laurence Harvey
and Frank Sinatra. The story was about a joint Soviet-Chinese plot to take
an American soldier captured in Korea, condition him at a special brainwashing
center located in Manchuria, and create a remote-controlled assassin who
was supposed to kill the President of the United States."

NUREMBURGCODEpage 11

"The judges at Nuremburg rejected such defenses and put forth what
came to be known as the 'Nuremburg Code on Scientific Research'. Its main
points were simple: Researchers must obtain full voluntary consent from
all subjects; experiments should yield fruitful results for the good of
society that can be obtained no other way; researchers should not conduct
tests where death or serious injury might occur, 'except perhaps' when
the supervising doctors also serve as subjects."

[Eleanor White's words:] A component of Directorate of Science and
Technology. Headed by Dr. Stephen Aldrich in the early 60s. Within this
book, the ORD apparently delved in to technologies that closely relate
to the current in-home, in-community psycho-electronic experimentation
going on today (1990s and beyond):

[p 224] "ways to control human behavior"

[p 224] "electrical stimulation of the brain"

[p 224] "electric and radio signals to move their subjects around"

[p 224] [1961] "prototype system whereby dogs can be guided along specific
courses"

[p 225] "wiring an animal and then directing it by remote control into,
say, the office of the Soviet ambassador ... for the delivery of chemical
and biological agents or for 'executive action type operations [assassinations]..."

[p 225] "ORD had access to prisoners in at least one American penal institution"

[p 225] "Scientific Engineering Institute ... set up in 1956 as a proprietary
company to do research on radar ..."

[p 226] "ORD also sponsored work in parapsychology."

[p 226] "Agency officials wanted to know whether psychics could read minds,
or control them from afar (telepathy), if they could gain information about
distant places or people..., or influence the movement of physical objects,
or even the human mind (photokinesis)."

[p 228] "...Agency wrote back ... that ORD had identified 130 boxes ...
of material that are reasonably expected to contain behavioral research
documents." CIA later refused to release this material.

SAFEHOUSEpage 99

[Eleanor White's words based on the book's text:] Apartments or houses
used by CIA or their contractors to carry on experiments on unwitting members
of the public. (In fact, some of the UNsafest places possible.)

TSSpage 59

"... the Technical Services Staff (TSS)...", "TSS was the direct lineal
descendant of Stanley Lovell's Research and Development unit in the OSS."

TERMINALEXPERIMENTpage 34 - 35

"Morse Allen believed it proved little or nothing to experiment on
volunteers who gave their informed consent. For all their efforts to act
naturally, volunteers still knew they were playing in a make believe game.",
"Allen felt that only by testing subjects 'for whom much is at stake (perhaps
life and death),' as he wrote, could he get reliable results relevant to
operations.", "Allen and his co-workers called such realistic experiments
'TERMINAL EXPERIMENTS' -- terminal in the sense that the experiment would
be carried through to completion." [Eleanor White's note: Meaning death
was not required.]

TABLE 4: QUOTES SHOWING EXPERIMENTERS' ATTITUDES

ALLEN DULLES &RICHARD HELMSpage 52

"...the [CIA] operators and their high level sponsors, like Allen Dulles
and Richard Helms, consistently pushed for the magic technique - deus
ex machina - that would solve their problems.", "They dreamed of finding
means to make unwilling people carry out specific tasks, such as stealing
documents, provoking a fight, killing someone, or otherwise committing
an antisocial act."

[Eleanor White: It would seem they have finally succeeded, given the
array of "machinae" that are in use today.]

"ARTICHOKE"EXPERIMENTEE SEARCHpage 33, 35

[p 33] "The matter was even more troublesome in the task of obtaining
guinea pigs for mind control experiments. 'Our biggest current problem
[early 50s]', noted one CIA memo, 'is to find suitable subjects.' ", "...
were mostly the dregs of the clandestine world [individuals of dubious
loyalty, non-American] to work on."

[p 35] "Any [non-CIA-sponsored] professional caught trying the kinds
of things the Agency came to sponsor - holding subjects prisoner, shooting
them full of unwanted drugs - probably would have been arrested for kidnapping
or aggravated assault.", "Yet, by performing the same experiment under
the CIA's banner, he had no worry from the law."

"ARTICHOKE"TALENT SEARCHpage 33

"During the talent search, another CIA memo stated why another doctor
seemed suitable: 'His ethics are such that he would be completely cooperative
in any phase of our program, regardless of how revolutionary it may be.'

CIA-GENERALpage 23, 25

[p 23]"CIA officials started preliminary work on drugs and hypnosis
shortly after the Agency's creation in 1947..."

[p 25] "Nearly every Agency document stressed goals like 'controlling
the individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will
and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self preservation.'
"

CIA-SECURITYOFFICEpage 28

[1952] "Similarly the [CIA] Security Office planned to use outside
consultants to find out about such techniques as ultrasonics, vibrations,
concussions, high and low pressure, the uses of various gases in airtight
chambers, diet variations, caffeine, fatigue, radiation, heat and cold,
and changing light. Agency officials looked into all these areas and many
others."

[Eleanor White's words: Reads like a catalogue of many of the current
in-home/in-community experimental effects.]

COUNTER-INTELLIGENCEpage 202

[~1960] "The Counterintelligence program had three goals: (1) to induce
hypnosis very rapidly in unwitting subjects; (2) to create durable
amnesia; and (3) to implant durable and operationally useful posthypnotic
suggestion. The Agency released no information on any 'field experimentation'
of the latter two goals, which of cours are the building blocks of the
Manchurian Candidate. Agency officials provided only one heavily censored
document on the first goal, rapid induction."

EWEN CAMERONpage 141 - 142

"He had headed Allan Memorial since 1943, when the Rockefeller Foundation
had donated funds to set up a psychiatric facility at McGill University.",
"...was elected President of the American Psychiatric Association in 1953,",
"...the CIA was supporting his work with about $19,000 a year in secret
funds.", "Here was a psychiatrist willing - indeed, eager - to wipe the
human mind totally clean. Back in 1951, ARTICHOKE's Morse Allen had likened
the process to 'creation of a vegetable' ".

[p 143] "The frequent screams of patients that echoed through the hospital
did not deter Cameron or most of his associates in their attempts to 'depattern'
[erase the minds of] their subjects completely."

[p 146] "...at McGill with Canadian defense and Rockefeller money. It
consisted of putting a subject in a sealed environment - a small room or
even a large box - and depriving him of all sensory input: eyes covered
with goggles, ears either covered with muffs or exposed to a constant,
monontonous sound, padding to prevent touching, no smells -..."

[Eleanor White: Dr. Ewen Cameron's work at McGill on 52 unwitting patients
resulted in a successful law suit against the CIA on behalf of eight of
them. See on this site: anat-1.htm]

GEORGE WHITEpage 99

"He was a law enforcement officer who regularly violated the law. Indeed,
the CIA turned to him because of his willingness to use the power of his
office [Federal Narcotics Agent] to ride roughshod over the rights of others
-- in the name of 'national security'.", "As yet another close associate
summed up White's attitude towards his job, 'He really believed the ends
justified the means."

"HEALTH ALTERATIONCOMMITTEE"page 81

"Brucellosis may well have been the disease that Gottlieb selected
in the spring of 1960 when the Clandestine Services'
Health Alteration
Committee approved an operation to disable an Iraqi colonel..."

The CIA's attitudes toward experimental ethics were not all new. "A
secret study commission under former President Hoover captured the spirit
of the call to clandestine warfare:

[Hoover's commission said:] It is now clear we are facing an implacable
enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and
at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable
longstanding American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered.
We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must
learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy enemies by more clever, more sophisticated,
and more effective methods than those used against us."

JAMES HAMILTONpage 215

"Hamilton ... had been used as a west coast supervisor for Gottlieb
... working on everything from psychochemicals to kinky sex to carbon dioxide
inhalation.", "[Carried out at Vacaville] 'clinical testing of behavioral
control materials' on inmates."

JOHN LILLY"page 152

"...Lilly invented a special 'tank'. Subjects floated in a tank of
body-temperature water, wearing a face mask that provided air but cut off
sight and sound.", "Could involuntary subjects be placed in the tank and
broken down to the point where their belief systems or personalities could
be altered?"

[Eleanor White: Our member Blanche Chavoustie personally experienced
this horror while kidnapped in upper New York state.]

MAFIApage 204

[~1960] "By going to the Mafia for hitmen, CIA officials in any case
found killers who had a built-in amnesia mechanism that had nothing to
do with hypnosis."

MILTON KLINEpage 204

"Hypnosis expert Milton Kline says he could create a patsy [a person
whom could be controlled to the point of committing a serious crime] in
three months; an assassin would take six."

MKULTRA DOCTORSpage 111

"In these [drugging experiments in foreign countries] operations, the
CIA men sometimes brought in local doctors for reasons that had nothing
to do with the welfare of the patient. Instead, the doctor's role was to
certify the apparent insanity of the victim who had been unwittingly dosed
with [LSD or BZ]. If a doctor were to prescribe hospitalization or other
severe treatment, the effect on the subject could be devastating. He would
suffer not only from the experience itself, including possible confinement
in a mental institution, but also the social stigma. In most countries,
even the suggestion of mental problems severely damages an individual's
professional and personal standing.", " 'It's an old technique', says an
MKULTRA veteran. 'You neutralize someone by having their constituency doubt
them.' "

[p 105] "If we were scared enough of a drug not to try it out on ourselves,
we sent it to [the experimental 'safehouse' in] San Francisco." [Eleanor
White: San Francisco was where a great deal of experimenting on unwitting
people "off the street" was carried out.]

RETIRED CIACASE OFFICERpage 49

"I never gave a thought to legality or morality. Frankly, I did what
worked."

RICHARDHELMSpage 13 - 14

"One of [General Wild Bill] Donovan's new recruits was [later CIA Director]
Richard Helms, a young newspaper executive then best known for having gained
an interview with Adolf Hitler in 1936 while working for the United Press.",
"He would become the most important sponsor of mind-control research within
the CIA, nurturing and promoting it throughout his steady climb to the
top position in the Agency."

ROCKEFELLERCOMMISSIONpage 220

[1974] "The [MKULTRA] drug program was part of a much larger
CIA program to study possible means for controlling human behavior. Other
studies explored the effects of radiation, electric shock, psychology,
psychiatry, sociology and harassment substances." [Eleanor White: Delicately
avoiding the issue of devices which transmit signals through space.]

SIDNEY GOTTLIEBpage 105

"As a matter of policy, Sid Gottlieb ordered that virtually no records
be kept of the [MKULTRA drug] testing."

YURI NOSENKO[THE VICTIM]page 154 - 156

[February 1964: KGB official Yuri Nosenko defects] "...CIA men had
guards watch over Nosenko day and night, giving him not a moment of privacy
... He was allowed nothing to read, not even the labels on toothpaste boxes.
When he tried to distract himself by making a chess set from pieces of
lint in his cell, the guards ... swept the area clean. Nosenko had no window,
and he was eventually put in a specially built 12' x 12' steel bank vault."

"For more than three years - 1,277 days to be exact - Agency officers
kpet Nosenko in solitary confinement."

[Eleanor White: This same singleness-of-purpose is reported by the members
of our psycho-electronic in-home, in-community experimentee group. Nosenko's
treatment definitely rings a bell with us.]

TABLE 5: INTELLIGENCE-MEDIA CONNECTIONS

Evidence of connections between intelligence services and the media
are extremely important to understanding why the general public have not
heard full details of even the earliest, post WW II atrocities by CIA and
others. That is why this table was included.

RICHARDHELMSpage 13

"One of [General Wild Bill] Donovan's new recruits was [later CIA Director]
Richard Helms, a young newspaper executive then best known for having
gained an interview with Adolf Hitler in 1936 while working for the United
Press."

WILLIAMCASEYpage --

Eleanor White: Though not mentioned in this book, an early CIA mogul,
William Casey, was apparently a journalistic mogul as well. When I find
specific evidence I will post the reference here.

TABLE 6: ORIGINS OF STREET THEATER & "PRANKS"

For people who hear about the "childish prank" type of intelligence
agency operations, some of which we call "street theater", a common reaction
is to disregard such "silly talk" and use these pranks as an excuse to
write us off as nut cases. The entries in this table are to show that "street
theater" has a long and well established history as part of intelligence
agency operations. The use of kids to carry out intelligence agency "pranks"
also has a long history as seen below.

Although not strictly "street theater", the "practical joke" type
of bodily effects below are included too for compactness.

"PRANK"CHEMICALSpage 17

"[Stanley Lovell and his associates] ...came up with a line of products
to cause sickness, itching, baldness, diarrhea, and/or the odor thereof."

WHO? ME?page 15

[OSS, World War II] "Unlike most weapons, 'Who? Me?' was not designed
to kill or maim. It was a 'harassment substance' designed to lower the
morale of individual Japanese.", "It was loaded into collapsible tubes,
flown to China, and distributed to children in enemy occupied cities. When
a Japanese officer appeared on a crowded street, the kids were encouraged
to slip up behind him and squirt the liquid on the seat of his pants. [Stanley]
Lovell named the product 'Who? Me?' and he credited it with costing the
Japanese 'face'."

MKULTRA/MKSEARCHpage 211

"Gottlieb ... moved 18 subprojects back into regular Agency funding
channels, including ones dealing with the sneezing powders, stink bombs,
and other 'harassment substances'. TSS officials had encouraged the development
of these as a way to make a target physically uncomfortable and hence to
cause short-range changes in his behavior."

PARTIAL LIST OF PARTICIPATING INSTITUTIONS

The list below is to show the public that "beautiful, ivy covered walls"
have hidden some of the most gruesome, Nazi level atrocities imaginable,
in the U.S. and Canada, in peacetime. The visitor is urged to consider
that the bulk of MKULTRA records were destroyed, and that there have almost
certainly been other atrocities not released with the documents provided
to John Marks, the author of this book.

Remember too that our group's MKULTRA survivor members can back up
the institutional kidnapping and torture with first hand testimony, so
institutional participation is backed up by more than this book itself.

A footnote on page 211 reads: "At the 1977 Senate hearings, CIA Director
Stansfield Turner summed up some of MKULTRA's accomplishments over its
11-year [??] existence: The program contracted out work to 80 institutions,
which included 44 colleges or universities, 15 research facilities or private
companies, 12 hospitals or clinics, and 3 penal institutions."